HS Library Computer Refresh (Solving Low Disk Space Issues)

The past few days Salvatore and I have been working on a refresh of the high school library computers. There was an issue with low disk space. These computers are running Windows 7 and had 40GB hard drives. On most days, students are in and out of the library just about every period. Some teachers have their classes in there and some students just drop by throughout the day to do research. The problem we were running into was every couple of days a new ticket would come in for one of these computers having low disk space. Students wouldn't be able to login in at all, or if it did log in, they would have limited functionality like no printer access because group policies could not properly load.

The problem was occurring because of a few reasons. 1. 40 GB hard drive running Windows 7. It can be done, but it doesn't leave much extra space. 2. Students don't always use the same computer when logging in. In Windows 7, each time a user logs in over the domain, a user profile is created for that particular user if none exists yet. These folders are large in nature, but if a student has a lot of work saved, that will start to eat into the hard drive space.

So after students would log in so many times, Windows would run out of space and users would have trouble logging in. If they were able to log in at all, they would be greeted with this:

The number one solution for this problem would be getting larger hard drives. Luckily, we happened to recycle some old hardware this year and were able to pull some 80GB drives to help. We already have a FOG server setup, so pulling the images wouldn't be bad. We were able to use an existing image we already had from one of the business courses. That teacher teaches accounting and uses less resources with software like Microsoft Office and internet browsers. This is exactly what they needed in the library, as most students pull up their work through Google Docs anyway. Perfect.

The imaging process went smoothly. During this time, we changed how the computers were positioned. Previously, they were laying down. We stood them up to make some more room and managed the cables a little better. One computer needed a new mouse during this time, but everything else went fine. The end result:

Success!

Now that the computers were done imaging, I just had to go through and rename each one and add it back to the domain. A pretty quick process just be sure to follow the exact order listed.

Now that they have bigger hard drives, it will take a longer time to fill up than before. Have you had this issue? Here are some solutions:

1. Get a bigger sized hard drive. This is the fastest way, but costs the most money.

2. See what is taking up all the space on your drive with a program like SpaceSniffer. Don't see anything out of oridnary?

 Find the program here

3. Remove old programs/files that aren't needed. This will free up some space. Just go through the usual Add/Remove programs and get rid of stuff not being used. If you remove stuff or don't have a lot of things installed on your computer in the first place, it could be malware on your system. Run a scan in safe mode with Malwarebytes or your favorite malware program.

4. Disable hibernate if not used. Disabling this can free up some space as hibernate will use the same amount of hard drive space as your RAM size. Ex: 4GB of RAM = 4GB of hard drive space being used. At a admin command prompt, type powercfg -h off to disable hibernation.

5. Run disk cleanup. Disk cleanup can give back a bunch of space that was previously being used by Windows and other programs.

6. Run CCleaner. This will delete things like disk cleanup, but can also delete temp files used by internet browsers, etc. Note: CCleaner only cleans files of the current user logged in and running the program. Periodically run this program, around 1-2 per month or as needed.

Find the program here 

Check out the Tweak Guides site to see about changing other settings that computers with limited space my benefit from.

Guides can be found here

There is also a program I found for deleting user profiles that I intend to test on these computers as they start to fill up. It is called delprof2.

Find the program here

There you have it. A quick solution to the Windows is out of disk space errors and messages.

Chromebook Repairs and Parts YouTube Channel

Found a good YouTube channel for tear down videos on lot of different model Chromebooks. Was looking into how the keyboard gets taken out on a Lenovo N21 Chromebook.

Check out the Chromebook Repairs and Parts channel

Should be helpful to some especially those working in educational environments servicing Chromebooks.

The Surfing Pizza Blog

Found a neat blog today about toy collecting, pop-culture, and even pizza?!?!

One of the first articles I came across was about crazy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures.

Count me in on the nostalgia and feels.

Check out The Surfing Pizza. 

Edit PDF Files on a Chromebook

For teachers and students working with Chromebooks, the ability to edit and save .pdf files can be extremely useful. Looked into a solution for this today and found DocHub.

Check out DocHub here.

Chromebook users should download it from the web store here. 

DocHub will let you import a .pdf file from your Google Drive or Dropbox and let you edit it and then download the newly created file or save a copy back to your files.

PowerShell Pickups #1

Hey all,

Recently was messing around with Windows Powershell and making a few little scripts. I'm going to be learning more as I go, but figured this would be a nice little blog segment entitled PowerShell Pickups. PowerShell Pickups will be little snippets of code, scripts, and information while I learn more things in PowerShell.

For these I just used Windows PowerShell ISE which is a little IDE type environment for PowerShell. You can also use notepad as well and save the file as .ps1

Note: To get these scripts to run you may have to change a policy on your computer. For me, I did Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
and then I was able to run my PowerShell commands. If you want to undo this you would use
Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted

My first little script does the job of killing all browser processes for every browser on a system. I often have a bunch of windows open with multiple tabs. Overnight, things tend to break or Flash will crash leading to a massive hangup. It can be hard to get the windows to close manually, so I'll be keeping this little script handy on my desktop. The script is below:

Stop Browsers.ps1

Stop-Process -processname chrome
Stop-Process -processname firefox
Stop-Process -processname iexplore
Stop-Process -processname opera
Stop-Process -processname safari


Running this script will cause all of the above programs to close if they're open. If they are not open, an exception will be thrown saying that it could not be found.

Note: You could close out other programs this way too. Open task manger and look at the process list to get the process name and switch programs in and out as necessary.

If you play with PowerShell or want to start learning it, give the above a try. A quick little way to see some commands and results.